4.4  Variations II

In 1995 David Bernstein produced at Mills College "Here Comes Everybody: A Conference on the Music, Writing, and Art of John Cage". One of the concerts was devoted to realizations of Cage's live electronic music, and the Hub decided to implement a real-time version of Variations II.

VARIATIONS II (1961) is one of a group of eight works titled "Variations", composed in the two decades between 1958 and 1978. Rather than conventional musical scores, these works are sets of instructions that specify disciplined activities to prepare a performance. The instructions for VARIATIONS II include transparent sheets that contain either lines or points. The performer(s) are instructed to superimpose these transparencies on a surface and "drop perpendiculars from the points to the lines" to determine readings for six variables of the music. These variables are frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, occurrence in time, and structure of the sound event. From this (rather tedious) preparation, the performer obtains a score from which the performance is rehearsed.

The graphical algorithm defined by Cage in VARIATIONS II, with its painstaking method for making decisions about musical parameters, seemed to be ripe for adaption to our algorithmic, network music. We decided to make a "live" version of this work, in which the casting of superimposed lines and points would occur as part of the performance, the music being automatically computed through the network according to Cage's instructions. Computer graphics artist Bill Thibault collaborated with the Hub in coding Cage's algorithm and creating an animated video display of each casting that was projected over the ensemble during the performance. A central MIDI interface, the Opcode Studio 5, made possible the simultaneous distribution to all musicians of measurements made from virtual lines and points. Each musician computed his own performance independently, but all the data used in these computations arose from the same graphical matrix. In addition, as each musician required more information for creating new events or for determining the details of a complexly structured event, he could request the graphics computer to "nudge" the overlay, thereby creating the necessary data.

In contrast to the "traditional" compositional method, this realization allowed us to create music that is unique to each performance, and that need not be rehearsed; both goals served for us to update Cage's concept to the current sociological and aesthetic situations. The process of realizing the work in new form re-emphasized to us the appropriateness of his compositional strategies to the medium of electronic music.

One of the strands in the musical philosophy of the Hub was the interest in defining musical processes that generated, rather than absolutely controlled, the details of a musical composition. An acknowledged influence on this interest was the work of John Cage, and it seemed a natural extension to us to try to automate the indeterminate processes used in his work. Many of these processes are extremely time-consuming and tedious; and given that Cage was himself involved for a long time in live electronic performance, we felt a real-time realization of these processes during the progress of a performance was not only feasible, but aesthetically implied.

A video of the opening moments of the performance in the Mills College concert hall.